to her car, indulging in a little window-shopping along the way. Her phone pinged. A text from Eric Vargas.
See U tonight?
As she pondered her response, she saw an elderly man cross Lincoln Avenue toward Leland. Potbelly, pants pulled too high at the waist, bright white sneakers, and a wedge of yellow foam rubber on top of his head.
She began to run. A CTA bus cut in front of her. She dodged it, avoided a UPS truck and a bicyclist, but by the time she’d reached Leland, the man was gone. She searched the area, ducking into alleys and side streets, but the man with the Green Bay Packers cheesehead was nowhere in sight.
Piper reminded herself that she hadn’t gotten a good look at his face. But Howard had the identical potbelly and the same penchant for wearing white sneakers and hitching his pants too high. The height had also seemed right.
The theme from Buffy interrupted her thoughts. It was Jen. “Berni wants me to use my media contacts to get the public to look for Howard. And she’s guilted Amber into helping her put up missing person flyers. Everybody’s going to think she’s crazy.”
Piper gazed out at the brick buildings lining the square. “Maybe not quite as crazy as you think.”
She arranged to meet Jen and Amber at Big Shoulders Coffee on Friday. They’d all have preferred one of the neighborhood bars, but Amber had to sing later that night.
On her way to Lakeview, Piper planned her strategy for dealing with Coop. “Let me up,” she said, when he finally answered his intercom.
“You got food with you?”
“No food, but I make a great omelet.”
“You can cook?”
“Sure, I can cook.” No need to tell him she hated doing it, but Duke had expected her to cook and take care of the house right along with acting like his son instead of his daughter. Nobody knew more about growing up with mixed messages than she did.
“Okay, you can come up. But you can’t ask me any more questions that I can’t answer. Got it?”
“Absolutely. No questions.” He knew she was lying, so she didn’t feel bad about it.
When she stepped off the elevator into his condo, she found him sprawled on his couch holding an ice pack to his shoulder. He hadn’t shaved, and his burnt-toast hair was a delicious rumple. Despite the bruise on his jaw, he was just so . . . everything. All that battered, lived-in masculinity would wake up any woman. Even the dead ones. Rugged men like him were born to win ball games and sire warrior children.
Children? She had to get more sleep. As much as she liked kids, she didn’t want her own and wasn’t in the habit of thinking about them.
He came off the couch. He was shirtless, and he wore gray sweatpants like other men wore Hugo Boss. They slipped low on his hips, revealing a flat, muscled abdomen and a thin line of dark hair pointing straight toward . . .
Toward her stupid downfall.
She was furious with herself. This had to stop. She was calling Eric. She was going to get this . . . this urgency out of her system even if she had to seduce Hottie in the back of his squad car.
“I’d ask how you’re feeling,” she managed to say, “but some things are self-evident.”
“I’ve been through worse.”
“Shouldn’t you bandage up your chest?” Right this second. Wrap up all that muscle so I can’t see it.
“They don’t do that anymore,” he said. “Constricts your breathing.”
So what was her excuse? Because she could barely fill her lungs.
Just as she found herself praying he’d put on more clothes, he grabbed a zippered navy sweatshirt from the back of the couch and shoved his arms through the sleeves. But he didn’t zip it. “You mentioned something about an omelet?” he said. “Let me see what I’ve still got growing.”
Sweatshirt falling open to reveal one of Mother Nature’s masterpieces, he went out to his rooftop garden. Instead of using his absence to regain her equilibrium, she followed him.
He was pulling up something she at first thought was an onion but then realized was a leek. He looked so much more at home here than he did working the crowd at Spiral. Utterly relaxed. It struck her how much digging in the dirt with those big, competent hands suited him.
“It doesn’t feel right,” she said. “Somebody like you owning a nightclub.”
“I don’t know why you’d say that.”
“Because Farmer Coop was born to plow the